Abstract
The last two decades have seen a surge of support for normative quietism: most notably, from Dworkin (1996, 2011), Nagel (1996, 1997), Parfit (2011a, b) and Scanlon (1998, 2014). Detractors like Enoch (2011) and McPherson (2011) object that quietism is incompatible with realism about normativity. The resulting debate has stagnated somewhat. In this paper I explore and defend a more promising way of developing that objection: I’ll argue that if normative quietism is true, we can create reasons out of thin air, so normative realists must reject normative quietism.
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Notes
All page references will be to Scanlon (2014), unless otherwise indicated.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
While Scanlon seems to appeal to a distinction between “first-order domains” and other domains (21), he never clarifies the distinction. I take it that he considers the following to be an instance of a second-order (or at least, non-first-order) domain: “a domain concerned with the general idea of existence that applies to everything we are committed to quantifying over in a range of particular domains” (23). This is all that I have in mind by the phrase.
This is a somewhat unfortunate choice of terminology given that plenty of related and orthogonal theses go by the same name; but I believe we should stick to it, since Scanlon repeatedly uses the term “autonomy” to describe this core aspect of his view (e.g., 21, 23).
These pure claims all have the following form R(p, x, c, a): if p is true and an agent x is in condition c, p is a reason for x to perform act a (or have attitude a) in c (31, 37).
To clarify, the claim here is not that if quietism is true, any given individual can create new reasons out of thin air. As is familiar from conventionalist approaches to other domains, it may well be the case that if quietism is true what reasons exist depends on what some collective does, chooses, accepts, and adopts. [Cf. Carnap (1937) on mathematics and Hume (1739) on property.] I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
To clarify, I will not defend these realist commitments; that would take us too far afield. So I am not arguing that we cannot create reasons out of thin air, and hence am not arguing that Scanlon’s quietism is false. Rather, I am simply arguing that—despite frequent, prominent claims to the contrary—Scanlon’s quietism cannot vindicate these realist commitments.
See footnote 2.
Quietists could respond by denying that all such discourse involves the same concept, “reason”. But this response faces two problems. First, it is ad hoc. While Scanlon’s position on how we attribute this concept is not clear, it seems to turn on the distinctive role that “reason” plays in deliberation and motivation (54). Claims about “legal reasons” et al. play those same roles in deliberation and motivation, at least among those who take what Hart (1994) called the “internal point of view”. Second, it makes it hard to explain disagreement. The world is full of prudes who take the internal point of view towards etiquette norms. When they take Prudish Reason to be true and I take Prudish Reason to be false, I take it that we disagree about whether there is a reason for the unwed to be chaste. How can we make sense of this disagreement if the prude and I do not use the same concept, “reason”?
See, for example, Scanlon’s references to standards justifying existential claims (25, 123).
Maguire (2014) defends this interpretation: “The text is richly ambiguous between two interpretations of this “settling” relation, as between the constructivist view that standards for settling truth-values ground those truth values, and the realist view that even the best employment of the standards for settling truth-values may get things wrong. As the last sentences of the book suggest, the balance of Scanlon’s conviction lies with the realist position.” Wedgwood (2015) suggests a similar interpretation: “Given that it is plausible that different sorts of beliefs are justified in different ways, there is no reason for accepting the Quinean view that there is a single method for answering all ontological questions”. It is hard to see how to square this interpretation with the explicit textual evidence, or with Scanlon’s ambitions.
These include, inter alia, (a) Scanlon’s refusal to commit to naturalism or non-naturalist Platonism, (b) his views about indeterminacy, and (c) his responses to objections (below).
This was Scanlon’s response to the argument in personal correspondence: “In order for us to be free to “set up” etiquette or some other domain however we like, it must be understood in a way that does not involve interdomain conflicts ...[but] in order for such a domain to entail conclusions about reasons it must be understood in a way that does involve such conflicts”.
Scanlon confirmed that this was his view in personal correspondence: “in cases of inter-domain conflict, we need some reason for giving priority to one domain. The success of science in delivering systematic, accurate predictions gives us ample reason to give it priority.”
First, it is unclear whether Scanlon is committed to indeterminacy. He starts his discussion claiming that determinacy is a “much less plausible hope” for normative domains than for the mathematical domain (85), and ends by taking it to be a fact “that the domain of practical reasons is not a unified subject matter like the domain of sets, the content of which we should expect to be determined by overall principles characterizing this domain” (104). Is determinacy an implausible hope, or is indeterminacy a fact? Secondly, Scanlon discusses the determinacy of mathematics at length, but does not discuss the determinacy of other domains, including physical science. Thirdly, it is “utterly unclear” (as Wedgwood 2015 says, 5) why Scanlon takes indeterminacy about normativity be plausible. More on this below.
While “it seems clearly true that the fact that some action is necessary to avoid serious physical pain is, in most circumstances, a reason to do it”, it can be “uncertain at the edges”, in that there can be borderline cases of pain, or of pain that is not “worth bearing” (85–86).
See Haidt (2012) for evidence for and discussion of these empirical claims.
This mirrors Scanlon’s response (29) to Enoch (2011)’s “counter-reasons” example (124).
Humorism is the historically influential view that physical and mental qualities are caused by the proportions of the four cardinal humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
I thank Tristram McPherson for this suggestion. It is, to be clear, not Scanlon’s view.
See footnote 2.
See Saatsi (2014) for recent discussion.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jonathan Dancy, Nicholas Laskowski, Sarah McGrath, Tristram McPherson, Philip Pettit, Gideon Rosen, Michael Smith, Jack Woods, and an anonymous referee from Philosophical Studies for their help and feedback.
